The H.265 codec brings Ultra HDTV resolution in 2013

A new video codec is about to come in town, bringing a "Ultra" high-definition resolution that's 16 times larger than the standard "Full HD" resolution of nowadays' TV sets.

Just got a new, shiny 50” Full HD (1080p) TV set for your home video needs? Prepare to purchase something newer, shinier and with a much, much higher resolution soon. The Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding reached a new milestone for the H.265 video codec during the past week, and is about to unleash the new “monster” video standard within the next year.

The H.265 video codec, also known as High Efficiency Video Coding or HEVC, is being designed to replace the current H.264 standard used for high definition and Full HD (1920x1080) video encoding and decoding. The Joint Collaborative Team, a collaboration effort between the MPEG Expert Group and ITU-T, has just achieved a “committee draft” in a meeting in San Jose.

The new video standard is expected to provide a huge difference in data transmission and streaming efficiency compared to the previous one, with one of the speakers present at the meeting suggesting a 67% improvement.

H.265 will be designed to support new, still to be created video delivery and streaming technologies from day one, including devices working at 4K and Ultra HDTV (also known as 8K or 4320p) resolutions. Just to put things in perspective, the Ultra HDTV definition contains about 16 times the amount of pixels present in a 1080p video stream.

Before appearing on the market as a proper video standard, H.265 will have to achieve two more milestones: the draft international standard meeting is expected to be held within six months from now and the final standard ratification should arrive in January 2013.

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calibre – E-book management

This is a free and open source e-book library management application developed by users of e-books for users of e-books It Converts, lets you play with the metadata, upload etc. It's compatible with all the major ebook readers.
These are the main features:

• Library Management
• E-book conversion
• Syncing to e-book reader devices
• Downloading news from the web and converting it into e-book form
• Comprehensive e-book viewer
• Content server for online access to your book collection

Calibre Website http://calibre-ebook.com/

BlueScreenView

It scans all your minidump files created during 'blue screen of death' crashes, and displays the information about all crashes in one table. Easily locate the suspected drivers that possibly caused the crash. Much easier to use than Windows Debugging Tools.

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/blue_screen_view.html

Seedlings Update

This is one month on, most germinated and are doing pretty good.

My Cactus hobby

I have a few cactus but recently I have been enjoying trying to grow a few of my own. I sourced seed's and began. I tried a styrofoam box with air vents and glass on top this works but at night the temperatures still drop, maintaining temperatures in the day can be a slight problem though shade cloth helps.
I needed a much better way to maintain temperatures 24/7 for reliable germination. The result a aquarium heater propagation hot box.

These seedlings are a result of being started in the styrofoam box method but as the nights can be cool (warming now) the seeds were at risk of not germinating so I moved them to the new heating method and the result is in the photo.
These are Desert Rose's (Adenium obesum)

My propagation box currently has a 24 cell seedling tray in it. I have more Desert roses mainly but I have a mixed row of seeds: Euphorbia enopla, Euphorbia suzannae, Woolly torch cactus (Pilosocereus palmeri), SEA URCHIN (Euphorbia obesa) and I even have a few Saguaro Cactus seed's planted to see how they go.

LAME 3.99

Today, LAME is considered the best MP3 encoder at mid-high bitrates and at VBR, mostly thanks to the dedicated work of its developers and the open source licensing model that allowed the project to tap into engineering resources from all around the world. Both quality and speed improvements are still happening, probably making LAME the only MP3 encoder still being actively developed.

I still use lame with Audiograbber convert CD's to MP3's. Just remember if you're using it with Audiograbber you want to unzip LAME 3.99 and the only two file you need are lame.exe and lame_enc.dll place these two in the programs directory on windows 64bit C:\Program Files (x86)\Audiograbber and it's pretty much the same with with 32bit windows it just won't say (x86) in it.


http://lame.sourceforge.net/
You can download from here http://www.rarewares.org/mp3-lame-bundle.php

Jarte Word Processor

Jarte is on the face of it simple and no more automated than is strictly necessary, but there's a lot of very neat tricks under the hood. The freeware version is very feature rich, upgraded to the full paid version which is cheap and you can use it on all the household's PCs with a single licence.

Its "clickless" interface can be helpful to someone with limited hand function.

http://www.jarte.com/